Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

Raphel's Aristotle

Aristotle is “Mr. Secondary Rhetoric” --Secondary rhetoric – transferring meaning of faculty to the training program

• What do we learn from all of these lists and categorizations? Having a name for something gives you some kind of power/control. Categories put you in a position to know hoe – gives you an analytical tool
• Aristotelian rhetoric lives on in France. Perelman – New Rhetoric – categorizes every type of argument – wants to do to argument what Aristotle did to figures of speech.
• divisions: logos, pathos, ethos. /Artistic proofs—rhetorician constructs material, Inartistic proofs—rhetorician interprets existing evidence
• Rhetoric has piecemeal format—difficult to understand –not coherent because it is student notes
• 5 canons can be extrapolated from the Rhetoric, but he did not name them as such
• Grimmaldi reads Aristotle as dividing artistic proof in 2 major categories – enthymeme and example. Rational, ethical, and pathetic become subdivisions under each. Rational, ethical and pathetic appeals are typically present in all reasonable arguments. Aristotle treats rhetoric as legitimately appealing to whole person, not just rational, which undercuts the customary usage of Aristotle to defend a purely logical or scientific use of language.” (Bizell and Herzberg 175)
• Becomes handbook, what to use when. Cicero will pick this up and really organize.
• Aristotle is different from Gorgias (don’t need to know anything)– he thinks it is good to know something if you want to talk about it.
• Aristotle is trying to work with epidoxa, to characterize and subdivide the epidoxa
• Aristotle recognizes that rhetoric happens in public and the audience in public has a social role. In that social role, they will be engaged in conflict (very unPlato) – judges, juries, and assembly members. Plato eschews social roles and only works with individuals. Aristotle embraces social construction/social roles and recognizes that rhetoric is a way to handle conflict – civil argument/struggles for victory. Plato desocialized the investigation of truth.
• Aristotelian rhetoric has NO truck with science – episteme – rhetoric is not a science. Rhetoric is know how – techne – how to persuade people and come up with the words to do it.
• Descartes is Aristotle’s nightmare – Descartes’ has no way of dealing with disagreement but he deals the death blow to classical rhetoric – reason alone – human reason – same reason – can persuade
• Aristotle shares Plato’s infatuation with definition. Plato gets to definition by dialogue and questions. Aristotle simply stipulates definition – you learn not how he defines things but the things he defines. Give things a name and then you can use them – you can’t recognize things until you name them and know where they come from.
• Think about Raphael’s painting - Plato pointing up , Aristotle pointing to the world. Aristotle is trying to keep things practical.
• Aristotle connects criminals and pleasure seeking an presents pleasure as a potentially destructive goal, inferior to happiness, like Plato in Gorgias.
• In Book I Aristotle discusses the relationship of law and justice – distinguishes “particular law” from “law of nature”
• For Aristotle, rhetoric happens in the agora, in the forum of political action. In that forum, anger is a primary motivating fore – anger can even motivate against self-interest to seek Justice.
• Aristotle might look like he is saying “just appear virtuous,” but he is not necessarily jettisoning ethos – he is talking to people in a large crowd so you may only be able to appear virtuous. Not the virtue of the speaker has but the personae established in the speech; the character created by the speech has to sell the ideas; personae can be defined by gender, age, clothing, language, race, class
• Section on fallacies is important so that you can detect them.
• Delivery – Aristotle’s long catalogue of figures of speech – more than half come from poetry and drama. Rhetoric blends into poetry and drama – shows the first place rhetoric and poetry merge
• Start of deeply rooted belief (dogma) that analyzing figures of speech improves your own writing – probably not true, but deeply held. Aristotle is origin of belief that if you memorize al these things you will write this way – this became dogma in 17th century French Port Royal school - the first time 1650’s the teaching of language became silent. Children wrote and tried to be “correct” – rhetoric was just “decorated logic”
• Aristotle was very powerful in middle ages. In 1170 he was rediscovered by Arabs, but did not make it to Western Europe until 13th century with great Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas.
• Aristotle stuck around until 1600’s – what stayed was his scientific work but his logic and rhetoric took a beating. By 1500’s Aristotle was decadent scholasticism. Rhetoric had made comeback in 1400’s, was high speed in 1500’s. In 1412 The Complete Quintilian (the Ciceronian curriculum) was found.
• Schaeffer -
  • Foundation of rhetorical experience is epidoxa. When we are up against epidoxa – what everybody thinks – the word is separated from the object – rhetor must be aware of common opinion. This is why rhetoric is frequently accused of being deceptive – you have to work with what everyone thinks, a common opinion that may or may not have anything to do with reality. Vico prosecuted common opinion to the bottom and couldn’t get back to Aristotle after Descartes and Locke –reformed and revived through sensus communis
  • “Hard to explain Aristotle – all you can do is be Aristotelian.”
• Some concepts become alienating so you have to be alert to all meaning. Aristotle was trying his best to corral it all – none of it works unless you know the common opinion. In post-Enlightenment common opinion fell out of education
• Milton assumed extensive common opinion formed by reading classical literature – everyone read Ovid – a highly literate epidoxa. This is the major argument for literary education. It provides a richer set of associations, or doxa, when you see and recognize a greater range of associations. The bigger set of identifications that you can use to make arguments.
• From here on out everyone is either Aristotelian or explaining why he or she is not Aristotelian
• Aristotle could be the difference between literary and non-literary studies
• Aristotle was the psychology of rhetoric until Freud.

Maxims are like the first part of enthymemes
Maxim (probable)+ application = enthymeme
General premise + specific application = enthymeme
Phronesis

Books

• Books I and II –invention, defines rhet as counterpart of dialectic and lays out key terms; virtue in rhet—echoes Plato; discusses justice, various laws,
• Book II -- Ethical and pathetic appeals, analyzes emotions, —abrupt turn to enthymeme, lays out 4 lines of argument or common topics that can be used to organize enthymemes in any kind o speech. Suggests guidelines for finding examples and arguing from maxims. Best enthymemes based on knowledge spec
• Book III –persuasive argument delivery (very brief), “the way in which a a thing is said does affect its intelligibility…owing to the defects of the hearers” and “foundation” of good style is “correctness” pay special attention to metaphor -“ gives style, clearness charm and distinction” and makes meaning for the acute mind. Chapters 13-19 are on arrangement, certain parts require special handling (i.e. forensic – later developed into stasis theory)

Definition of Rhetoric

• "the faculty of discovering in any particular case all of the available means of persuasion."
• Rhetoric is a faculty not a discipline – an ability to do something, ability to observe the available means of persuasion, not a body of knowledge but a talent – the “faculty” short circuits the “mere rhetoric” claim and puts rhetoric inside the head – this is the strongest refutation of the sophistic formulas –knowing the good arguments is a talent.

Signs

• a sign is an inference based on experience – the best kind of sign has a necessary inference – because of this fact something else can be deduced (“ he stopped breathing, so he is dead’)
• Most of the time the sign (the inference) is PROBABLE – probability is key phrase for Aristotle (Plato hated probability)
  • Something that may or may not happen
  • May or may not be true
  • May usually happen but not necessarily

Common Topics

• are a way of trying to deal with probability
• Cause effect
• Past fact – future fact
• Circumstance
• Rhetoric deals with probability and tries to get from probability to conviction – to move from probably is to might to will
• Syllogisms are certain – but the only things worth talking about are things you are NOT certain about - -life is mainly about probability – so Aristotle proposes the enthymeme – a syllogism whose premises are probable

Rhetorical enthymeme

• is never about specifics or all or each and every – they are general.
• Enthymeme has 2 meanings – 1 in philosophy 1 in rhetoric
  • Philosophy – it’s a reduce syllogism (missing a step) – Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal (leave out all men are mortal)
  • Rhetoric – probably premises - on the basis of experience X, probably
• Enthymemes are inductions – based on experience but limited experience
• How do you persuade people that an enthymeme is true in a particular case and lead people to conviction that enthymeme applies to one particular case? Epidoxa – shared knowledge based on experiences – knowledge from opinion e.g. Canada’s armies are on Minnesota border – this means they are up to no good.
• Aristotle wants to taxonomize every enthymeme and how you aim them at different kinds of people (particular psychological types) and hope that they will be persuaded.
• Effectiveness is making a probability look plausible – this is what rhetoricians do and Aristotle catalogs every way to do it
• Aristotle tries to form a common opinion about OPINION. Most people have shared experiences that will remain the epistemological basis of rhetoric until Descartes (he throws experience out the window to try to find universal reason).
• Book III – taxonomy on steroids – all figures of speech and how you use them
• P232 – The parts of rhetoric we admire the most are the parts that make us feel we are smart enough to figure them out – example: We drive away thirst with the shield of Bacchus. What is shield? -- glass or cup. How do you know? What is between thirst and wine (Bacchus)? A smart rhetorician will plant things like this so that the audience feels smart. If they figure it out themselves, they are more likely to believe – we are inclined to believe truth we have discovered ourselves. In Poetry we call these conceits(the connection you figure out yourself)– Aristotle created them.
• Cicero example – Rome is the fortress of the world. What is a fortress and what does it do? Protect and strength – world sought protection and refuge in Rome

Maxims

• a pithy phrase or sentence which states a general truth, usually a prudential meaning (e.g. a stitch in time saves nine), a short moral.
• Maxims state a variety of prudential truths and warnings and they often contradict one another. Hebrew bible – book of proverbs
• Proverbs typically passed on orally. They give advice but the fact the speaker KNOWS the proverbs establishes ethos in a non-literate world – establishes speaker as a fountain of wisdom (but they only work if you know when and where to apply them. There are a whole bunch, know which ones to use and when)
• Phronesis – practicality – knowing what parts of your knowledge to use in a particular situation, a kind of practical wisdom, the opposite of “book learning,” knowing what to do
  • Proverbs are where common opinion lives (Vico –all societies have the same proverbs – promote social behavior which will lead to beneficent outcome.
  • Proverbs are always conservative because they have been true over time
  • Are frequently expressed in poetic language so that they can be remembered
  • Contain of folk wisdom- people who have folk wisdom are wise
  • Maxims can’t really be refuted. You can only use another maxim. Non-literate people can’t really argue; they live by maxims. Aristotle was smart enough to know that. For Aristotle, with non-literate audience, go with maxims.

3 levels of style

• high, mid, low
• High – speaker knows more, learned ethos is okay
• mid - speaker and audience appear to be same level (de rigueur for American politics
• low – “shuckadern” school – appear almost non-literate to invoke proverbs (Mark Twain, Will Rogers, folk wisdom)